Reliability:
-Authority: This article was posted in The Guardian, a British daily newspaper. The piece was written by Alok Jha, the Guardian's own science correspondent and also a physics graduate from Imperial College London.
-Accuracy: He quotes Richard Easterlin from USC, David Bartram and Alexander Gorban from the University of Leicester.
-Timeliness: The article was published December 2010.
Source: si.smugmug.com
Money is happiness, right? Most people connect the two ideas and automatically see a positive correlation.That isn't necessarily true. Jha's article disproves this line of thinking by citing a new study that may prove that happiness has little relation to income. The study was completely unbiased and it looked at countries that had capitalist and non-capitalist economies (Check this study out here!). It was conducted by Easterlin from USC, a self-proclaimed "happiness scholar."
He says this about his findings: "Simply stated, the happiness-income paradox is this: at a point in time both among and within countries, happiness and income are positively correlated," he said. "But, over time, happiness does not increase when a country's income increases."
Countries like China and South Korea have seen large jumps in their per capita income. Sure, these countries are happier than their less developed counterparts. But compared to their earlier numbers, their happiness has seen not as large a jump. In South Korea's case, the numbers, although too insignificant to consider, have even dropped. These findings bring up some important questions, such as: What are the true factors involved in increasing happiness? Health? Family? Also, does gratefulness play a factor in any of this? For example, as we make more money... do we in turn become less grateful of our material success?
You focus more on countries, but is the same thing true for individuals? How does money affect individuals' happiness?
ReplyDelete